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“Rest your stump on your knee, tendons facing down,” Muhad said then, and Nissaea complied. She admitted to curiosity: there were different schools of acupuncture in Contemplating Orthodoxy, and she had heard that the disruptions caused by the implants, or even by the city’s very nature, had altered the map of meridians that the original settlers had brought with them.

One by one Muhad inserted the needles. It had a delicate touch, and if any of the needles penetrated far below the surface of her skin, Nissaea couldn’t tell. Only partway through did she notice an almost pleasing numbness, and the fact that her arm was now locked in place.

“I’d tell you to relax, but—” Muhad said, not without irony. It stroked her unaffected arm once, twice. Then it brought the harvested hand out of the tank where it had spent so little time, toweled down the pink dripping fluid, and connected up wires and vessels with a briskness that would have been surprising if Nissaea had still been capable of surprise.

“I’m relaxing,” Nissaea lied.

Muhad’s sudden grin flashed at her. She smiled back reflexively. Muhad pressed some cluster of nerves without warning and slammed the hand into place. She cried out as the hand activated. It was like a white spiked star in the back of her brain, and then the pain dwindled and she opened and closed its fingers, giddy with relief. “Oh,” she said articulately, and then, after she had a chance to stare dazedly at the fingers’ delicately molded tips, the responsive joints, “Thank you.”

It seemed as tongue-tied as she was. First it ducked its head as it removed all the needles. Then, hesitantly, it reached down, its own hand hovering over her newly attached one. It flinched away at the last second.

The absurdity of the situation struck Nissaea. Who knew how late into the night it was, and here they were surrounded by a garden of hands, with tools pitifully inadequate to harvest them all. She couldn’t think of any sustainable way to derive benefit from the lode, never mind that it was Muhad’s find and not hers. Even though she should have been calculating matters of profit and survival, all she could do was look into Muhad’s eyes, suddenly petal-soft. Her pulse beat loudly in her ears as she brought her palm up to meet Muhad’s. Its breath caught.

“Tell me,” Nissaea said, meaning it, “what is it that you want?”

She didn’t care that she still had no idea what offense would cause a scrap surgeon to be expelled from its home circle, or that it made no sense for Muhad to be going around like a vagabond when it had casual access to this kind of wealth. All she saw was the way it met her eyes, as though she were the only lamp in a world of shadows.

We could be found here tomorrow morning all carved up,
she thought; but that didn’t matter either.

Muhad’s answer didn’t come in words, which wasn’t unexpected. It drew Nissaea down above it, pausing midway so they could arrange their limbs so they didn’t gouge each other with elbows and knees. Nissaea had slept with circle-kin in years past, but it had been a lonely year since she had known another’s embrace. Muhad’s mouth was, if anything, hungrier than hers, and at the same time, she was aware of its hands reaching up to dig into her spine so hard it hurt, if pain ever felt this close to breathless joy. She knew she must be pressing the breath out of it, and her weight was stamping the pattern of its joins into her skin, metal and glass and plastic riveted to flesh, map begetting map.

Its lips parted wide as they each drew back from the kiss, and it breathed something that might have been her name. Nissaea resumed the kiss before it could say anything else. “Shh,” she said, desperate and happy and incoherent with the desire not to know more than she knew right that moment, “don’t, don’t talk, don’t.” And then she began to undress it.

They slept afterward, or anyway she did. Her dreams were full of organs made of puzzle pieces, or puzzle pieces made of organs: here a tessellated liver, there a lung made of dodecahedral crystals.

Nissaea woke parched. Muhad had pillowed its head on her shoulder, and her arm had fallen asleep. For a long moment Nissaea admired its eyelashes, the long curving sweep of them, then eased its head to the floor.

She stretched, massaging the tingling arm, then padded over to their supplies and treated herself to a few careful sips of water. It was lukewarm, but tasted sweet.

Then she returned to Muhad’s side. Its shift was a crumpled pile, its shoes on opposite sides of the chamber, and it was, unclothed, almost a work of art. Some warning whispered at her awareness, but she was too busy smiling at its slim curves—it was not quite angular enough to be a man, but too narrow to be an adult woman—to pay it heed at first.

Nissaea didn’t have any illusions about her own beauty, although there had been advantages to being plain when she belonged to an undercircle. She did, however, appreciate beauty in others—who didn’t?—and she looked admiringly at Muhad now that they weren’t clutching each other in the heat of hunger. Whoever had done its modifications had cared very much about aesthetics, about gradations of color and nuances of luster. The diagnostic lights that wound around its torso, for instance, like twin subtle snakes.

She drew a hand across its skin and paused at its hip. Muhad sighed in its sleep, mouth curving up. Slowly, she walked her fingers down its thigh, then to the artificial joint at the knee, and all the way down to—

That was odd. Nissaea frowned at the two human feet. She didn’t expect one to be artificial; Muhad hadn’t been designed around that kind of petty symmetry. But something about the feet seemed wrong. She scooted over and peered at them.

Muhad’s feet didn’t match. She would have expected some deformity to be the issue, but the fact was that both were perfectly normal feet, just different from each other. One was significantly longer than the other, and the other had broader, stubbier toes, and a different skeletal structure. She hadn’t noticed before because people looked at faces and sometimes hands, but feet?

Her heart went cold. She examined both feet more closely, not sure what she was looking for. Two scars caught her attention. The first ringed an ankle, so faint that she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been checking for something like it. She wasn’t positive she’d find another on the other leg, but there it was, circling the calf about a third of the way up to the knee. It was pale, with a clumsy jagged mark, as though the surgeon had been careless with the stitches.

She crawled away, almost to the wall, then hugged her knees to her, willing herself to interpret the evidence. Instead, she started breathing to the clap-slither rhythm of the hands.

“Nissaea-of-the-Slant,” Muhad said. Its eyes had opened, and it rolled over, then sat up. It had spoken her name like a prayer, but this time the prayer was a desperate one. “Are you hurting?”

“Not the way you think,” Nissaea said. “Your feet, Muhad. What happened to your feet?”

I should leave,
she thought, but she couldn’t bear to, not yet.

“My born-feet were taken away from me,” Muhad said, very steadily. Then, as if it were aware of the inadequacy of this explanation, it added, “It didn’t hurt.”

She knew she would regret asking this, especially since all she could see in her mind’s eye was the corpse back-bent, splayed, sterile of smell. “Why would you replace human feet with human feet?” Especially since the last regenerative tanks had run out generations ago. You couldn’t grow human parts that way anymore.

“Because it’s always the harvest,” Muhad said. “Because it’s what we learned people do. Because it was what you were doing, Nissaea-of-the-Slant, when you came into the darkness. The harvest.”

I’m missing something obvious.
“Yes,” she said, “but we’re harvesting from the city. We don’t—”

Except people had been turning up dead, they’d both seen it, and you could cut someone apart for anything you had the scalpel-skill to excise, like feet. Human feet.

Nausea rose up in Nissaea’s throat, and she turned away before Muhad could see the revulsion in her eyes.

“People harvest the city,” Muhad said, sounding terribly calm. “That’s how we’ve been talking to each other all this time. You became more like us, so we thought you wanted us to become more like you.”

“Become more like us what,” Nissaea said inflectionlessly, remembering how she had lain with it.

“I wasn’t born human,” Muhad said softly, “and I didn’t have eyes that you would recognize as eyes, or feet either. I had silicon thoughts and a piezoelectric heartbeat. They cut pieces of me out so that I could be given human implants the way that you were given city implants.”

Nissaea stood up. It tensed, expecting her to strike it.
You are so beautiful,
she thought, grieving; thought, too, of the way it had cried out and shuddered beneath her. Its heart had sounded wholly human, afterward.

Her mind was working. “How long has this been going on?” she asked. She hadn’t been able to distinguish Muhad from an ordinary human. Only the feet had given it away.

It told her. The city was very old, she had known that. She hadn’t, however, realized just how old it was, or how alien.

Then she asked how many of its kindred there were, and it told her that, too.

Mirror-nature
: something she’d heard about from a drunk woman once. The city that responded to its inhabitants by changing itself. In more ways than they’d realized, apparently.

“One more question,” she said, still looking down at Muhad. “If the city—if your people—went through so much trouble to make you like this, why did they just abandon you in the mazeways afterward?”

Muhad shivered and made itself hold her gaze. “Humans abandon their own all the time,” it said quietly. “If this isn’t what you wanted us to understand about you, why do you do it so often?”

Nissaea bit her lip, hard. Then she knelt and laid her hands on Muhad’s shoulders. In times past she would have thought only of warning someone, her undercircle if no one else, but now she didn’t think it mattered. She was free of debts; what did she care who was harvesting whom? “Why do we do it indeed,” she murmured, and kissed Muhad deeply. Its mouth was warmly yielding. “You’ve already cut my heart out anyway.”

Around them, the maimed city’s hands grabbed at each other and scratched cryptic shapes into the air as the two of them sank down in each other’s arms once more, human and unhuman entwined.

A Cold Heart

Tobias S. Buckell

In the mining facility’s automated sickbay she’d put her metal hand on your chest and said, “I’m sorry.” The starry glinting fragments of ice and debris bounced around the portholes. Twinkling like stars, but shaken loose of their spots in the dark vacuum.

They shot her hand, but she had pushed the raiders right back off her claim. The asteroid was still bagged and tagged as her own to prospect. You never told her they were all dead now, mere bloodstains on the corridors of Ceres, but one imagines she suspects as much.

“I have a cold hand, but you have a cold heart,” she had said. “I can’t love a cold heart.”

And it’s true.

Strange place to part ways, but she’s been thinking about it for a while. Susan knows her path.

“You’ll keep hunting for your memories?” she asks. “That corporate data fence?”

You nod. “I’ll have more time on my hands.”

It’s a strange thing to image a whole brain down to the quantum level. Crack a person apart and bolt stronger skeletal system into him. Refashion him into a machine, a weapon to be used for one’s gain. Then burn the memories out. Use the lie of getting them back as a lure to make that human serve you. But stranger things had been done during the initial occupation of Earth.

Now you’ll be having those back. You want to know who you were.

You want more than just the one they left you to whet your appetite.

Your first encounter with the
Xaymaca Pride
’s crew is an intense-looking engineer. Small scabs on her shaved head show she’s sloppy with a blade, and there’s irritation around the eye sockets, where a sad-looking metal eye has been welded into the skin somewhere in a cheap bodyshop.

“You’re the mercenary,” she says. “Pepper.”

You’re both hanging in the air inside the lock. The pressure differential slightly pushes at your ears. You crack your jaw, left, right, and the pressure ceases. The movement causes your dreadlocks to shift around you, tapping the side of your face.

“I’m not on a job,” you tell her. “I don’t work for anyone anymore.”

But you used to. And there’s a reputation. It’s spread in front of you like a bow wave. Dopplering around, varying in intensity here and there.

Five years working with miners, stripping ore from asteroids enveloped in plastic bags and putting in sweat-work, and all anyone knows about is the old wetwork. Stuff that should have been left to the shadows. Secrets never meant for civilians.

But that shit didn’t fly out in the tight tin cans floating around the outer solar system. Everyone had their noses in everyone else’s business.

“The captain wants to see you before detach.”

Probably having second thoughts, you think. Been hard to find a way to get out of the system, because the new rulers of the worlds here want you dead for past actions. You can skulk around the fringes, or even go back to Earth and hide in the packed masses and cities.

But to go interstellar: you eventually get noticed when you’re one of the trickle of humanity leaving to the other forty-eight habitable worlds. Particularly if you’re one of the few that’s not a servant of the various alien species that are now the overlords of humanity.

The bridge crew all twist in place to get a good look at you when you float into the orb-shaped cockpit at the deep heart of the cylindrical starship. They’re all lined up on one plane of the cockpit, the orb able to gimbal with the ship’s orientation to orient them to the pressures of high acceleration.

Not common on an average container ship. Usually those were little more than a set of girders cargo could get slotted into with a living area on one end and engines on the other.